SACRAMENTO, Calif. — There’s a Sacramento-area homeowners association so fed up with erratic drivers, sideshows and even porch pirates, they’ve taken matters into their own hands.
The community known as ‘The Hamptons’ in North Natomas has installed seven license plate readers at all of the main entrances into the neighborhood in hopes of making their community a safer place.
Now, those plate readers are being used to give tips to police.
"We have a lot of vehicles that do donuts on our major intersections," Ed Perez, President of the Hamptons Owners Association said.
Tucked along Kokomo Drive in Natomas, where neighbors say people drive too fast, you’ll find one of seven license plate readers. It was just installed last month.
"This is a resource that we want to be able to tap into if we need to," Perez said.
Weeks after they were put up, Azeem Bath, who lives only five houses away from that camera had a package stolen. The whole thing was caught on his Nest home security cameras.
"I was just kind of like did that really happen right now?” Bath said.
It wasn’t worth much, but Bath says that doesn’t make it ok.
"These small little packages that these people are stealing, I almost feel like they feel like they can get away with it because they’re not really going to pursue hard charges on them," he said.
The driver is seen on camera speeding away before his door was even fully closed.
"But they made one mistake, they turned into our community and one of our cameras captured them," Perez said.
The new license plate reader captured a photo, just seconds after leaving Bath’s home, clearly showing the suspect's license plate. That photo has since been handed over to the Sacramento Police Department. A spokesman for the department said it is still under investigation at this time.
"We found out that he lingered in our community, in our neighborhood for about 45 minutes," Perez said.
Perez says only a few members of their staff have access to the photos from these readers, which, despite the signs, are not being monitored 24/7. They’re stored for 30 days and will only share with police on a case by case basis.
He says these cameras have a very narrow field of vision, designed just for tracking license plates.
"It only captures a little square, a virtual box, on the street and it’s designed just to really capture that plate, so it’s not meant to capture somebody walking their dog in the park or just somebody walking by," he said.
As for Bath, he says, it gives him peace of mind because even though he has his own home security system, the cameras aren’t always strong enough to capture the plates.
"Knowing that they’re there, I think yeah, it does make me feel a bit more comfortable that if something was to happen, the communities around, the neighborhoods around me could have my back," Bath said.
A spokesman for the Sacramento Police Department said these cameras are perfectly legal as they are in a public place and clearly marked that they are recording 24/7. They say any video or photo evidence like this can always be used as a tool to help them solve crimes.
